Say hi to the grossest historical recipe I’ve ever made! A little while ago, I was talking to a friend about the “Vegetarian Cookery” section of my c.1938 copy of Mrs Beeton’s Household Management. I told them that I was pleasantly surprised at some of these recipes. Then I saw the recipe for “Nut Sandwiches.” Nut Sandwiches – from Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management Ingredients – Walnuts finely chopped, …
Recently I thought it might be a fun quarantine project to revisit my copy of Mrs Beeton’s Household Management, c.1938, and make another historical recipe from the book. I narrowed it down to two that I thought would be fairly easy and interesting, and asked my Instagram followers to choose which one I should make – celery croquettes won out! This book is one of my prized possessions. I’ve made …
Last year, I found a copy of Mrs Beeton’s Household Management in a secondhand book store, and snapped it up eagerly. It isn’t obvious when it was printed. A previous owner wrote her name and the year 1944, but certain things made me believe this was already a few years old when she got it – for instance, references to “The War,” and nothing written about rationing. Based on dates I found …
A Mrs Beeton recipe: Tomatoes, Stuffed, With Mushrooms Read More »
Since I last cooked from my c.1938 copy of Mrs Beeton’s Household Management, I’ve wanted to try another recipe. I marked out a few contenders that didn’t necessitate sourcing a pheasant or a sheep’s head, and today’s lunch was: Carrot Soup with Rice. Here’s the recipe: Ingredients – 2 pints of white second stock, 1 pint of milk, 5 large carrots, 1 onion, 1 strip of celery, 1 leek (the white part …
Another Mrs Beeton recipe: Carrot soup with rice Read More »
A couple of months ago I stumbled upon my dream book in a secondhand book store. Despite the name, Mrs Beeton’s Household Management isn’t my dream book because I yearn for the upper echelons of hausfrauness or anything. I discovered an older version of the book in 2008, and since then I’ve been interested by it from a historical perspective. It was the first book to present recipes in the format …
One of the reasons I love reading Victorian/Regency novels is that I get a glimpse of the everyday rituals, strange to us now, that were so important to the people performing them. One of those rituals that always seemed at once charming and terrifying to me was the obligation of the morning call 0r social visit. So much seemed to hinge on those visits! For example, from Jane Austen’s Persuasion: “Where shall …
Etiquette of morning calls and visits of ceremony Read More »
But then one day, you know, I suddenly realized with an absolute shock that there never was going to be a convenient time, and that if I didn’t make a beginning, I would be saying to my grandchildren, ‘What I really wanted to be was a writer.’ So I had to make time. – PD James, interviewed on CBC’s Writers & Company I’d never read anything by PD James. Even so, …